The Avatar

by Anderson, Poul

  The T machine was alone, light-months from the closest astronomical body and that a dimness which merely happened to be passing by. Whatever path it followed was made for it by the entire multitude. The cylinder was twice the size of any that the voyagers had seen before. Twenty-three beacons attended it, spread across a hundred thousand kilometers.

  "We are near the center of the galaxy, inside the clouds." Joelle's tone had regained steadiness, a dreamlike tranquility. "Here are many more stars than it holds elsewhere, and the survivors we see are its oldest, formed close to its beginning. There may be a black hole of monster size which has swallowed up millions of them and is still doing so. If that is true, then the rate of it has become very low - for the radiation background is only moderate - and we must have come far into our own future, when none but the longest-lived dwarfs remain shining."

  Weightless in his command seat, in silence and wonderment, Brodersen heard himself ask, "Why didn't the gate we took lead to any of them?" Pegeen might find words for what I feel right now, but my dumb brain can only bring up flat quackings - could only do that even if I weren't stunned.

  "The T machines cannot have infinite range. Relays must be necessary, placed at the optimum space-time locations for their purpose. This one could serve more places, by orders of magnitude, than the galaxy has members. That, and its dimensions, and what I have already observed and calculated while we traveled, make me believe that the longer paths it generates go extremely far."

  "A junction- Wait!" Brodersen roared. Revelation exploded in him. His pulse became a war-drum. "Listen, listen! A civilization, a whole set of civilizations, or, or likelier something we've no word for, no idea of - and the Others themselves - their people must pass through here. If we stay, we'll meet them!"

  A shout and a babble rang through the intercom from every station in the ship. Weisenberg let it subside before he uttered his caution: "Hold on. How often does anybody come by? Probably most transits get made directly, just because the average machine can take you to more worlds than you could exhaust the possibilities of in a million-year lifetime. Maybe this is used once a century or thereabouts. On the time scale the Others know, that'd make constructing it worthwhile."

  "We can't tell before we've tried," Brodersen said, calmer.

  "We can't lie in free fall the whole while," Caitlin warned. "Indeed, our latest boost was much too short for keeping us healthy."

  Brodersen considered. "Right." In sheer exuberance: "You've got to kick that foul habit of yours, Pegeen, of being always right.

  "Okay, we need weight, and we don't want to go into spin mode before we must, but keep our options open as long as possible. So we'll boost back and forth in the neighborhood. Say -urm - four hours outward, turnover, and four hours back, decelerating. That way we'd never be more than a million kilometers off, nor have too high a relative velocity. Shouldn't be any problem to detect a spacecraft appearing and punch a signal at her."

  "Why should they use electromagnetic waves for communications?" Dozsa objected. "I'm told the Betans don't."

  "The Betans do keep the capability of receiving it, in case of need," Rueda said. "Moreover, our jet radiation ought to register on instruments."

  "And we could rig a big, fat, blinking light on our hull," Leino added excitedly.

  "Well," Brodersen called, "how about it?"

  Chinook flew. She went at three-fourths of a gee, less than her captain had assumed. Caitlin had pointed out that that was sufficient and would make reaction mass last longer. Folk walked lightly, on their feet and in their hearts.

  Entering Joelle's cabin, the paramedic found the holothete standing amidst its bleakness. Everybody else usually kept something on the data retrieval, be it simply music or a static work of art. Here the screen was blank and mute. Unless you counted the neatly made bed, the room held no trace of personality.

  In a loose blue kaftan Caitlin had made for her, Joelle seemed like a sculptured Boddhisatva. Her untidiness was gone, she was washed and groomed and reasonably well rested; but gone, too, was the last real earthliness. Huge-eyed within a coil of gray hair, her face was ivory pale, nearly fleshless, sexless, inhumanly serene. The hand she lifted and the smile she gave in greeting traced abstract curves. Her voice was melodious once more, but the melody was for no mortal ear.

  "You are most obliging to come," she said: a formula.

  "No trouble to me," Caitlin replied. "We do need you built up physically, and if you'd liefer begin in privacy, why the first exercises I suppose I'll be prescribing for you require no gym equipment." She set down her medikit and opened the case. "We start with a checkup."

  Joelle pulled her garment over her head and dropped it on a chair. Caitlin studied the scarecrow form, circled about, ran searching fingers across the skin. Joelle stayed quiescent save to move her arms out of the way on request.

  "No harm in reasonable underweight," Caitlin remarked. "I could wish my arse were a tad less veritable. Yours, though, is positively ethereal." Her conversational gambit failing, she turned brisk. "We do have to restore the wasted muscle tissue, the which means you will eat more proteins; and a slight layer of fat is normal in a woman. Tell me, what are some of your favorite dishes? I can try to make meals you find appetizing."

  "It makes no difference," Joelle said. "Inform me of how much to consume of what and I will."

  A frown flickered over Caitlin's forehead, but she had no immediate answer. Proceeding with the examination, she found basic good health. That included neurological signs. The tensions, tics, and twitches were gone, reflexes were excellent, a slow and even cardiac rhythm maintained blood pressure that a person two decades younger might covet.

  "End of the routine," she said at last. "You can dress. I'll be doing the standard tests on cell and fluid samples, but I make no doubt they'll prove fine."

  Joelle slipped the kaftan back on. "Then I may as well commence your program, if you'll spell it out."

  "M-m-m, I'm not through yet. Have a chair. I want to talk with you.'

  When they were seated, and Joelle had passively waited for Caitlin to speak, the latter did. "I can prescribe for your body, but that may be slim use when I know nothing of your mind. For instance, how faithful will you be about instructions?"

  "Very." The promise was neither fervent nor reluctant. "I assume they won't interfere unduly with my work, and appreciate that their purpose is to keep a breakdown from interfering."

  Caitlin's mouth tightened. "There's what frets me the most. How much holothesis can you take before something happens to you? What might that be? Would it be irreversible? Has it already begun? Joelle, none of your Emissary mates claim they ever knew you intimately, but they agree you've turned into a complete stranger. I've never heard tell of anyone spending well-nigh every waking hour in linkage. No, at home the time is limited by rules, and I wonder mightily whether Dan should enforce them on you."

  "Do you fear damage?" the other woman asked, unruffled.

  "Aye. Induced schizophrenia, maybe, or a condition that mocks it, or- Who can say? I'm hardly more than a nurse who's had some extra training. The medical references aboard swamp me in technicalities on this subject, then give no diagnostic symptoms nor prognoses, for the situation is unprecedented. Nevertheless, you are behaving more and more... autistic." Caitlin leaned forward. "Be honest. Are we, the rest of us, anything else to you than part of the machinery?"

  "Of course," Joelle responded, still placid. The smile crossed her like a moonbeam briefly through clouds. "I like all of you, wish you well, aim to do everything in my power to get you safely home. To that end, I had better develop the power. I assure you, far from going crazy, each day I become more sane than any of our species has been before in its whole existence."

  "Och, a whale of a claim to be making."

  "Yes, it does sound grandiose when put in that ape-chatter man calls language. I wish you could have the experience. You're a poetess, who might be able to convey a hint of the feeling, if n
ot of the reality. I have no eloquence, and have had less practice than average throughout my life at expressing myself to ordinary people. Furthermore, unlinked, I am, well, less than half alive." Joelle paused to search for phrases. "I suppose Susanne Granville has tried to explain how linkage is for her. That's the palest shadow of what it is for me. You don't think she's mentally ill, do you? Or- when you're composing- when you're making love, you surely more fully than most - those are transcendental experiences, aren't they? You seek them over and over, every chance you get. They don't unhinge your reason, do they? On the contrary, aren't you the stronger and stabler for them?"

  "They're natural," Caitlin argued. "They evolved in us from the earliest life ever to stir on Earth. And you've renounced them altogether. That can't be wholesome. Oh, yes, priests and nuns and saintly mystics, utterly dedicated scientists and artists, they've sometimes kept a balance. Maybe asceticism suited their temperaments better than common pleasures. Yet they did keep within the human world, seeking human goals, surrounded by things human senses can respond to - not wired in a machine. I'd never be forbidding you your holothesis, Joelle. I'm but thinking you should use the rest of yourself, too."

  For the first time, pain touched the countenance before her and the voice that answered, though barely. "I tried. Harder than you know. Year by year, the rewards of that shriveled and the hurts grew, till I was a silly, scrabbling crone when I was out of my linkage." Calm returned. "Meanwhile, on this flight, I began really using, really mastering what I'd learned on Beta. And Fidelio taught me more. And the incredible inputs, the whole cosmos opening to me, facets of the Noumenon that neither Betan nor human had dreamed of. Trying for insight, I've been discovering new techniques - ways to discern, think, understand - philosophies - and they give me deeper insights, which lead me onward-"

  The peace in Joelle rose to a quiet ardor. "Caitlin, believe me, I've never been so happy, and the farther beyond what you call humanness, the happier and saner I become. No, I'm not better than you, but I am different, and how would you feel if a command robbed you of your gift for making songs and making love? I... I will soon be able to overcome a thing in me that I know is wrong: that I pity you. Poor sweet beautiful animal, I pity you. But I don't think the Others would, so I should not either.

  "The Others- We may not find them. We may die in space, or on the world of some species that merely has superior technology to us. I can endure those things if either happens. But I'm convinced that every race, when it becomes able to, goes in search of the Others, as we've blundered into doing. What higher purpose can it have?

  "And... if we should find them, if we should... I will be ready to speak with them."

  Only later, having left a pledge behind her not to limit Joelle as long as no danger signals appeared, did Caitlin think of the last sentence, the unspoken one. I will be ready to join them.

  Chinook flew.

  The common room was asparkle with newly made decorations. Organ tones pealed from a data retrieval, through whose hologrammic screen glimpses of Earth and Demeter slowly paraded, a flower garden, an ocean sunset, a mountain peak, a tree in a meadow. Elsewhere, the stars and the galactic heart shone. Clad in their best, Dozsa, Weisenberg, Leino, Frieda, and Caitlin flanked a table behind which Brodersen stood. In front of him, Rueda and Susanne were hand in hand. At the rear of the chamber waited a feast which had been days in the preparing.

  Joelle alone was absent, but aware in her ascendancy of what went on. She had given the party her awkward benediction. A permanent watch must be maintained against the chance of an alien vessel emerging, to set instantly in action everything programmed, and she could replace the two who ordinarily were posted.

  Brodersen lifted the papers he needed. He being neither priest nor magistrate and the couple not sharing the same faith, it wouldn't have felt right to look up and use a traditional service. Caitlin had written this, and inscribed it with calligraphic flourishes as an extra gift for her friends.

  She should've presided, too, he thought. She'd put on a better show. I'm a slouch of a parson. I... damnation, my eyes are stinging and blurring, I'm not about to cry, am I? Lis, Lis, the sunbeams through the chapel window when we- "Dearly beloved," he began, "upon this day of our exile we are gathered to create a home. Lost, but lost among splendors; imperilled, but charged with hope: we ask the blessing of God, or we ask the blessing of life, on these two of us, Carlos and Susanne. We thank them for the courage they have renewed, the spirit they have brightened. Shipmates, may joy be always yours! Now let us witness your vows, the while that we pledge anew to each other-"

  A siren screamed.

  Chinook was not far from the T machine, moving outward, to make a whole four hours available for ceremony and festivities before turnover interrupted. At electronic speed, Joelle switched the proper viewscreen to full magnification. The querning cylinder and a pair of its beacons seemed to leap into the room. But nobody glimpsed more than a blur, that whipped past sight and was gone.

  After a moment wherein music was obscene against the silence, Joelle's voice came, flat: "A ship. She completed transit in thirtyseven seconds."

  "Nombre de Dios," Rueda whispered, and caught his bride to him.

  Before she could lose a tear, Caitlin was holding them both. Across their shaken shoulders, she called to Brodersen, "Dan, we've a larger matter to finish, aye, and celebrate, before we think about that unlucky business. Will you begin over?"

  The captain sat alone in his office. Its private line was connected to the holothete. His jaws clamped hard on a pipe, which had turned the air around him acrid and was scorching his tongue. A bottle of whisky stood on his desk beside the printouts of highspeed photographs.

  Those pictured a three-dimensional latticework, its widest dimension perhaps a kilometer, of no simple configuration, though graceful and fragile-seeming as a spiderweb at dawn, it also aglitter with dewdrop light. A pearly luminance cloaked the whole. That, and distance, left barest hints of any further details. The precise track it had taken had likewise escaped identification.

  Joelle said: "I suspect the vessel is almost massless, almost entirely a construct of force-fields. Those could cushion passengers and cargo against the fantastic accelerations that took her through her guidepath. If there is a cargo; if there are passengers. She may well be robotic - no, doubtless too crude a concept - and she may carry nothing but patterns, imposed on a few molecules, which are information. Why send your body anywhere? Why not a recording of your personality, that can be activated when it arrives - in an identical, manufactured body, or in one made for the particular purpose? It can do and experience whatever you want. Then it can return as a pattern and be... transcribed... into you... Why, you could live a thousand separate lives, on as many separate worlds, and afterward gather them all together."

  "Do you know this is true?" Brodersen asked dully.

  "Of course not. But I do know it's possible. I even perceive certain details of how it can be done. If you had such a capability, wouldn't you take advantage?"

  "Yeah, I s'pose. Then they'll never detect us?"

  "I didn't say that. Perhaps more primitive, material craft go through this point too. Every race in the fellowship may not be on the same technological level, for a number of reasons. Or perhaps the Others come by once in a while. I don't think those were Others, Dan. They would not have missed our presence."

  Brodersen took a drink. "What do you guesstimate the chances are of any of your cases being true? Somebody happening past who's not too advanced to pay attention, the way we're not too advanced to notice a fellow man in the woods. Or else somebody who's so very far along that his eye is on the sparrow."

  "I'd call the chances poor."

  "Yeah, me too. We may both be dead wrong, Joelle, deadly wrong, but what've we got to go on except our best guesses, you from your brain, me from blind instinct? If we stay here a few more months, pacing back and forth for the sake of weight, we'll've expended our reaction mass and have n
o choice but to go into spin mode and stay on. I call it better to keep what freedom of action we're able. I'll push for weighing anchor, when we discuss and vote on the question."

  Brodersen's pipe had gone out. He made fire to rekindle it. "We won't debate for a couple of weeks, though," he decreed. "Something could turn up meanwhile, just barely could. And Su and Carlos rate a proper honeymoon."

  Nothing did appear again.

  XLII

  Jump.

  In utter blackness, a colossal Catherine's wheel burned across a quarter of the sky. From where Chinook was it appeared tilted; vision crossed an arm, then the nucleus from which it curved, then an arm beyond that. It shone, it shone: the heart red-gold, the spirals blue-white, clusters scattered throughout like sparks. Elsewhere gleamed a few cloudy forms, attendants upon its majesty, and remotely the light from its kindred.

  "Intergalactic space," Brodersen whispered.

  "Some fifty thousand light-years out. More than that from where we were," Joelle said. Her tone held exaltation. "Judging by the colors, the relative brightnesses of inner and outer portions, there are fewer giant stars than our astronomers estimated, and less dust and gas for new ones to form out of. We must still be in our future, perhaps farther on. A billion years? Let's stay a while so I can learn!"

  Brodersen regarded the cylinder and its glowing markers. "Another T machine all by itself, and big like the last. A stepping stone to whole other galaxies... and ages - When you reckoned what guidepath would take us the longest ways, you reckoned well."

  "But still no sign of help for us," came Leino's weary voice. "How long can we keep hunting? Into what weird places?"

  Brodersen grimaced. "Yeah," he said. "I begin to wonder myself. Maybe we're not wise to plow ahead. Maybe Joelle should lead us in backtracking, if you can figure out how."